AS the country went through the motions of celebrating May Day on Thursday, representatives of labour groups across the country had a very different and painful story to tell.
Unemployment, under-employment, job insecurity, denial of workers’ rights, a state indifferent to the working class — the list of woes is long and seemingly intractable. Yet, as labour representatives have argued, the trouble for employees of public-sector enterprises may only just be beginning with the PML-N’s determination to push ahead aggressively with its privatisation plans.
Any debate about privatisation breaks down along predictable lines: one side argues that the state should not be in the business of business; the other side argues that only the state can run businesses efficiently and it also has an obligation to provide employment to the citizenry.
Yet, it is how those respective ideological positions are translated into action that is more problematic. In allegedly getting the government out of the business of business, the PML-N appears to put the rights of wealthy investors ahead of the infinitely less well-off middle- and working-class employees. As for the PPP, it appears to treat public-sector enterprises as little more than a means of disbursing patronage through granting employment to political supporters.
So now that a PML-N government has followed a PPP one, the PML-N can argue that it is the PPP’s poor policies that have left it with little choice but to sell off public-sector enterprises. Lost in all of this is the balance between the need to have a healthy job-creating economy and looking after the vulnerable sections of society.
What makes the PML-N’s line on privatisation difficult to accept is the focus on efficiency and best practices — but not across government, just when it comes to particular businesses that it wants to sell off. For example, a bitter bureaucratic war over the country’s largest social protection scheme, the Benazir Income Support Programme, has been allowed to play out without much concern for its impact on the running of the programme itself.
Or while so focused on privatisation, the government appears to have little interest in creating a reasonable regulatory environment, paving the way for monopolies and oligopolies that hurt the public interest. True, entities like the Steel Mills and PIA have too many employees and the workforce will eventually need to be rationalised.
But how much money do the vast majority of those employees really cost the state and how do those sums stack up against the extraordinary waste, corruption and leakages elsewhere in government? Would not the withdrawal of just a handful of tax SROs that favour wealthy and politically connected special interests more than compensate for this great loss the state suffers from? But those are issues the PML-N would rather not talk about.
Saturday, May 3, 2014
Where will the workers go?
AS the country went through the motions of celebrating May Day on Thursday, representatives of labour groups across the country had a very different and painful story to tell.
Unemployment, under-employment, job insecurity, denial of workers’ rights, a state indifferent to the working class — the list of woes is long and seemingly intractable. Yet, as labour representatives have argued, the trouble for employees of public-sector enterprises may only just be beginning with the PML-N’s determination to push ahead aggressively with its privatisation plans.
Any debate about privatisation breaks down along predictable lines: one side argues that the state should not be in the business of business; the other side argues that only the state can run businesses efficiently and it also has an obligation to provide employment to the citizenry.
Yet, it is how those respective ideological positions are translated into action that is more problematic. In allegedly getting the government out of the business of business, the PML-N appears to put the rights of wealthy investors ahead of the infinitely less well-off middle- and working-class employees. As for the PPP, it appears to treat public-sector enterprises as little more than a means of disbursing patronage through granting employment to political supporters.
So now that a PML-N government has followed a PPP one, the PML-N can argue that it is the PPP’s poor policies that have left it with little choice but to sell off public-sector enterprises. Lost in all of this is the balance between the need to have a healthy job-creating economy and looking after the vulnerable sections of society.
What makes the PML-N’s line on privatisation difficult to accept is the focus on efficiency and best practices — but not across government, just when it comes to particular businesses that it wants to sell off. For example, a bitter bureaucratic war over the country’s largest social protection scheme, the Benazir Income Support Programme, has been allowed to play out without much concern for its impact on the running of the programme itself.
Or while so focused on privatisation, the government appears to have little interest in creating a reasonable regulatory environment, paving the way for monopolies and oligopolies that hurt the public interest. True, entities like the Steel Mills and PIA have too many employees and the workforce will eventually need to be rationalised.
But how much money do the vast majority of those employees really cost the state and how do those sums stack up against the extraordinary waste, corruption and leakages elsewhere in government? Would not the withdrawal of just a handful of tax SROs that favour wealthy and politically connected special interests more than compensate for this great loss the state suffers from? But those are issues the PML-N would rather not talk about.
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